Never Lost
Wherever we are, we can serve Hashem despite what our emotions are telling us. With emuna, a person is never lost; Hashem’s mercy is everywhere…
As the years tick by I am realizing that my feeling of spiritual connection waxes and wanes. I imagine this is the case for most religious people. But since this is a relatively new state for me, when my connection feels weak it can be a little frightening. Am I going to keep sliding off the edge of the cliff and wake up one morning feeling no connection, God forbid? For Bnei Noach this can be especially tricky because we do not have a synagogue to go to, and sometimes no rabbi at all, or one who lives very far away.
When the connection feels weak, sometimes it is even difficult to pray properly. I imagine if I were Jewish, I would go to the synagogue and rev up the connection by staying busy until I felt it again. That’s what I imagine. I organize and work when I get worried, so I would work away the bad feelings until all that was left was a soulful glow, a spiritual high. But that’s not an option. There’s really no synagogue for me to labor in here, or attend, where it would not be strange to have the Bat Noach hanging around.
I feel like my spiritual life has become a project where only the hard stuff is left to accomplish. It’s sort of like cleaning your kitchen. You tackle the easy stuff first and work your way up to the hard stuff, like emptying out the fridge and defrosting the freezer. Perhaps it is arrogant to make the claim that I have taken care of the easy stuff. Really only Hashem knows that. He could be looking at me thinking, “Sister, you haven’t even scratched the surface of the easy stuff.”
There are times where I look at the situation of Bnei Noach who are very enthusiastic and am so overwhelmed by the enormity of the task before us, all I can do is laugh and shake my head. At least I think it is enormous, that’s how it feels to me. I ask God, “Why can’t this be easier? Tell me what to do, Hashem. Where are my people? Why can’t I go somewhere and be accepted with relative ease, a place where people are truly committed to Torah, where it doesn’t feel like they rewrite it every decade? Why have you selected this spiritual path for me?” There are times where I feel totally confused by my predicament. There are times it feels so strange I think I could look out the window and see pigs flying by.
I’m currently reading The Klausenberger Rebbe: Rebuilding, by Judah Lifschitz. Rabbi Halberstam’s devotion to Torah, to Hashem, to his fellow man was unrelenting. There are some people who show us the best that man can offer, in the midst of the worst that man can offer. Rabbi Yekusiel Yehudah Halberstam was one of them. The Klausenberger Rebbe was born in 1905 into a family made up of generation after generation of rabbis. The first half of his life was spent serving Hashem and his fellow Jew in the midst of the rampant European antisemitism that was to boil to a fever pitch in the Holocaust. He was thirty-five when WWII broke out, father to eleven children with his wife Pessel. By 1944, Rebbetzin Pessel and the nine children she had with her imprisoned in Aushwitz were murdered. Rabbi Halberstam, also in Aushwitz and then in other camps, persevered despite the epic loss. Prisoners who were with him in the camps told stories about the Rebbe’s surreal devotion to living righteously in the midst of crushing horrors, abuse, loss, and trauma. He prayed fervently, followed every religious rule he could, uplifted his fellow man when they wanted to give up and die. He and others even figured out a way to make matzos in the concentration camp so they could celebrate Pesach appropriately.
When his camp was liberated in 1945, the Rebbe said, “If the Master of the Universe in His great compassion and mercy saved me from death, from this moment onward, I am obligated to dedicate my life to Him and His honor.”
This is just the beginning of the story, in a way. The Klausenberger Rebbe seemed to embrace any task his Creator put before him despite learning that all eleven of his children had in fact been murdered. He worked to bury the dead appropriately after the camps were liberated. He cared for the orphaned children. He worked to create religious learning institutions for the Jews who had survived in an effort to keep Hashem in their lives. He never stopped and if he ever felt ripped off by Hashem, it seems that he did not let it sideline him. The rest of his life, he died in 1994, he accomplished so much I think it is fair to say maybe only a few times in a thousand years is such a person born.
We are going to not understand what is going on around us a lot of the time. The truth is that only Hashem knows what is going on at any given point, so this sense of feeling less lost, more lost – it might all be coming from an arrogant place. Wherever we are, we can serve Hashem despite what our emotions are telling us. When the Rebbe felt lost in a desert he found something to thank God for. He knew that even in the most heinous circumstances, God would find some tiny way to show mercy. Just the fact that his heart was beating seemed to be enough to express gratitude to Hashem, although there are times where to be alive seems a punishment. He showed that when we feel lost, feel forgotten, are abused we must become even more humble before the Creator. To the Klausenberger Rebbe his own sense of feeling lost meant nothing because his emunah was so great he knew that he was not lost because you cannot be truly lost when you are with the King.
6/02/2009
The connection to Hashem is constant even if we feel estranged Prayer, mitzot, tzeddaka – Bnei Noach and Jews can do these actions and strengthen our relationship with Hashem.
6/02/2009
Prayer, mitzot, tzeddaka – Bnei Noach and Jews can do these actions and strengthen our relationship with Hashem.